


In Other Words

by thereisalwaysroom



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types, Call Me by Your Name - André Aciman
Genre: Angst, Longing, Love Letters, M/M, Regret, Weddings, book!verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 15:40:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15076340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereisalwaysroom/pseuds/thereisalwaysroom
Summary: Billet-doux: a love letter.Oliver, to Elio, spring of 1988.





	In Other Words

**Author's Note:**

> Requested from the "Rare and Unusual Words" prompt meme on tumblr.

April 21, 1988

Elio,

      I heard of a tradition years ago, where you’d write a letter to your beloved on the night before your wedding. S—- and I decided to do so, and we’ll open them years down the line, we want want (or need) to look back.

      It wouldn’t be fair for me not to write to you. Even if I keep this just for myself.

      I know you must be angry. If not forever, then right now. I know you mind. I know I would.

      I do love her, Elio. You have to understand that. I love her, in every sense of the word.  ~~(A word I never said to you)~~. There are so many things I wanted from this life, so many dreams that she and I will fulfill together. We’ll buy a house, raise children, spend holidays together. It’s domestic bliss, when it’s good. She is beautiful and kind and sharp as a whip. She doesn’t let me get away with things.

      I think you’d like her.

      She doesn’t know about you. At least, not specifically. She knows you happened. I think she is glad. Glad I “lived,” she said. I felt strange when she said that, like you were a stepping stone or a box to check on a bucket list, but I knew what she meant. She wasn’t talking about you, necessarily. She was talking about us, what we became, what we did, how you made me better. How we evolved. Talking about me, by talking about you. Even to those who don’t know, they already can’t tell us one from the other.

      That’s the other part of this. I hate it. I hate being narrowed down to a learning experience. I am not a lesson, Elio, and neither were you. You can’t bring a person down to a point. You can’t be an experience. You can only be you. And you were me, I was you. I have never felt so cut open and messed up. Alive. You made me wild, real, tangible. It sounds strange to the ears, but I felt organic. Of the earth. Do you understand?

      You are young, and the beauty in your life I know will come to face terrible realities - some of them you’re aware of, if abstractly. I have a feeling that, somewhere, down the line, you will understand that love has nothing to do with this. I am not choosing her over you. I am not choosing. I don’t think I could. But you taught me to reach out and touch, to grasp at what was ours, or could be, even if it seemed thin and ethereal as smoke, all for the chance that it was solid. That is what I am doing, now. I have to reach out and take, and trust that you will do the same - you knew how long before I did.

      My bed is empty right now, and the last time it was and I thought of you like this, you knocked on the patio door, took me to bed and we made love for the first time. I can remember every breath, every sound you made, every inch of skin you made yours. I want to be back. I could live that summer on repeat, like a scratch on a record. You kissed your smile into my memory forever, I’d recognize you in a dream. Sometimes I do.

      I wish, right now, more than ever, that I could be back in heaven, listening to you play, those moments before we knew ourselves, those moments we denied our nature as magnets. I wish I could be back there, in bed, memorizing the line of your nose and lips as you lay naked beside me.

      I wish I could capture the taste of you, fresh from the shower, or after a dip in the river, or upon waking next to me. I wish I could see your mouth tighten again, the way it did when you were peeved. How you bit your lip when I moved inside you that first night. How it would drop open and loose those beautiful sounds the times after. How your voice broke when you told me you were about to come. I wish I could relive being beneath you when you took me on my back, how that little drop of sweat teetered on the end of your nose. When I wiped it away, you’d said, “I like it this way. Now, I can kiss you.”

      I remember how that yellow wallpaper in the men’s room made you look sick and tired and so, so young. I remember the taste of Rome, thick and cloying in your mouth. How every cell in me burned. You were never smoke. You were fire.

      I want it all. But there is a person past who you knew last summer, and I don’t know if you could love him, too. I know you would, or would say you would. But I would always doubt. In another life, another time, another world.

      Your soul is too free and loving and beautiful to be trapped. If anything, I could not bear the idea of corrupting the man you’re determined to become. You will change and grow, as you should, as we both should, and it thrills and saddens me at the same time.

      I pray that you can be proud of me, someday, in your way, as I am already so proud of you.

      Go to the Berm, beloved. Put your feet in the grass, and taste the earth, so that a blade of us might grow, soft and green, inside you.

      Go. Think of me. Speak our name.

                                                                                                                       My heart,

                                                                                                                                    ~~Oli~~  Elio

* * *

May 22nd, 2009

_Oliver lights a cigarette and runs his fingers over the stamps on the envelope, sealed for a solid twenty one years. Air mail. He takes a long drag, an acrid tang filling his mouth._

_He slides the long-unsent letter into the mailbox, followed by the second, larger envelope, addressed to the county courthouse._

_He takes another hit, then drops the cigarette to the sidewalk as he turns to go. It smolders, still lit, where he stood._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading, my dears!! If you enjoyed, feel free to leave a comment. I am thereisalwaysroom on tumblr.
> 
> XOXO, L

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading, my dears!! If you enjoyed, feel free to leave a comment. I am thereisalwaysroom on tumblr.
> 
> XOXO, L


End file.
